I agree. Alan puts all the thoughts battling my mind into clear and concise writing. I wish more people understood this war more, and that the media stopped their cruel cover of this war. Words matter.
I think if you take the time the time to read the body of essays on this topic, you may get a better sense. I linked to most in this essay, but I appreciate people don’t usually actual read those links for context.
That was such a great piece! Thanks so much, there's so much to think about here. And apologies for the double comment.
It seems to me that the great tragedy of the Palestinians, and the root of their endless misery, is that they have become not a people but a Cause.
And terrible things happen to people when they become a Cause: ironically their needs and the needs of their children to have a healthy future become almost irrelevant, or at least always secondary to the needs of the Cause. The Cause must always be fed and kept alive, it becomes an imaginary totem that can never be allowed to fail or die, and that must be sustained even if by gallons of blood and hecatombs of bodies.
And what a cause! Created and upheld by some of the most dishonest and malevolent actors of the modern world: Arab tyrants and mullahs, who redirect all the hatred and rage their citizens rightly feel toward them toward the evil Jews, their eternal scapegoat; the Soviets and their campus grandchildren, whose Permanent Revolution has now devolved into a permanent tantrum, hoping to destroy the Jewish state in the name of Equality, with Equality meaning drowning the West in shame and guilt in the name of their twisted utopia where a brown boot stamps on a white face forever; and last but not least, the Parisian Nihilist-Maoists, whose ultimate goal was to burn down the West all so the philosophes could prove how anti-bourgeois they are (a Parisian intellectual would rather be tortured on the rack than be thought "bourgeois").
And thus we have the Palestinian "cause": millions of people condemned to misery for generations all so various outside actors could pursue their own agendas, mostly involving acting out various Western schemes of a utopian future that all seem to bare a striking resemblance to a cleansing Apocalpyse.
The Palestinian people will continue to die and suffer as long as they remain a Cause, and the Israelis will have to suffer along with them.
Thanks mate, no apologies for the double-comment at all, I always appreciate your inputs. With the Arafat quotes, it is interesting how even when one spells out in their own words the intent of the movement, Westerners will jump through contortions of mental gymnastics to deny or excuse. This is the foremost reason why I relied so heavily on direct quotes in this essay; I'll add the Arafat one to the collection, thanks!
The distinction between a people and a Cause very much encapsulates the Palestinian predicament. I've racked the books to think of another similar example and always come up short. Obviously, various groups and peoples have adopted causes, but it has rarely been the primary determinant of a national identity.
And so the Cause has been moulded and manipulated by almost all actors falling under the "anti-imperialist" agenda in the 20th/21st Centuries. In a sense, these various actors situate themselves as the lead role in a morality play, and the Palestinians - in all their suffering - serve as props on the stage, background images of dead kids and rubble while some academic in America pontificates about "martyrs" and "resistance".
I find it so bizarre that the Palestinian diaspora doesn't see this for exactly what it is, but I think you outlined the reason; when the Cause is the totem, it must be sustained at all costs.
The Fallaci quote comes from "Interviews with History and Conversations with Power"—now that was one smart brave lady!
My guess is that being a Cause not just a people provides different benefits to the ruled and to the rulers.
For the Palestinian rulers, a motley crew of fanatics and criminals: they've siphoned off billions of aid dollars to their own bank accounts, and being a Cause keeps them from dealing with the burdens of quotidian goverment, as tending to the needs of their population is now a job for the UN;
and for the people: being a Cause, with its aura of holiness, its sacred Nakba and "right of return" and its roster of martyrs etc lets them feel like History's special children, like noble sufferers and spotless victims, existing on a higher plane than the rest of us.
And this goes double now that the West has replaced Christianity w Historical Victim Worship and they've been added to the roster of sacred victims.
The Palestinian leaders and their people are the incarnation of the Arab world's refusal to accept the Jewish state, and no one really cares how many of them have to die as long as they take a lot of Jews w them and also keep the dream alive: the dream of eventually eradicating the Jewish state, no matter how much death and destruction it takes.
Such a fantastic read again, Alan, thanks a lot for giving your brilliant thoughts such a wonderful and intriguing voice! Highly appreciate it - and already shared it, as I agree with another comment on here that it should reach a wider audience!
I wrote these words for the Jerusalemn post 9 years ago
Daech, on one side,
Hamas on the other side;
The charta of Hamas, the belchings of Daech and of all the Hezbollahs and other gangs of murderers, base their action on a fake: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
charta of hamas:
'For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. Only when they have completed digesting the area on which they will have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion, etc. Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there.' (art 32)
If you have not read it, do it, the charta of Hamas is a monument raised by men to stupidity and hatred;
by the way, let's remind some features:
the active militants of Hamas are 25 000 (1% of the population)
in 1939 there were 100 000 SS (0,2% of the German population)
I, French, born a mono-polytheist (roman catholic), am asking us a question:
Must we be as blind as our ancestors in front of the murders of innocent Jews and in front of the threat of an extermination of the Jewish nation,
Must we be as ingenuous in front of the murders of innocent people in Europe and in front of the threat of the destruction of Europe?
The war and all its murders in Palestina - let's not forget it -are the consequences of a problem born in Europe, and solved (?) by the Europeans politicians after the war.
Let's not give help of any kind to the extremists who find in the tearful and pityful, here in Europe, a great support to their deeds, because Hamas (and Daech and all the others) is an excellent communicator and far better at this than the Israeli governement; Hamas shows this ability when using the population of Gaza both as a weapon and a victim, making of these people an arm of massive propaganda when, after carefully chosen attacks, they push the Israeli Governement to be the executioner of innocent victims, that they – the Hamas – delibaretely sacrifice to have the well-off europeans deplore and cry and as a consequence, support the Palestinian politics against Istael's.
Is it possible to lament over the murderers of innocent victims in Israel killed by Palestinians and hate the murderers killing innocent victims in France?
Is it possible to blame the response of the Police and army of Israel and ask for the same response in France?
What did our ancestors do when Jewish kids were thrown in fires? And what is our answer to these children dressed in agony, arriving from Auschwitz or Kielce in our days of sad splendor to witness the posthumous triumph of the adulterous children of Hitler?
Let's not cling on to our prejudices, let's not be the ingenuous pilgrims on the path of words, calling antisionism what is nothing else but the stinking antisemitism of Drumont or the highly refined antisemitism of Ms Virginia Woolf, which leads us to reject a country which is the last defense in front of the barbarism that threatens us.
But no confusion, the murderers have nothing in common with human beings – christian, jewish, muslim, atheist, buddhist…
I stop here, because I have known since the first time I read Qohelet that there is no end to write and say too many words.
Arafat interviewed by Oriana Fallaci in the 1980s:
ARAFAT: We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation. The issues of this struggle, whether our friends like it or not, will always remain fixed by the principles that we enumerated in 1965 with the creation of Al Fatah. First: revolutionary violence is the only system for liberating the land of our fathers; second: the purpose of this violence is to liquidate Zionism in all its political, economic and military forms, and to drive it out of Palestine forever; third: our revolutionary action must be independent of any control by party or state; fourth: this action will be of long duration. We know the intentions of certain Arab leaders: to resolve the conflict with a peaceful agreement. When this happens, we will oppose it.
FALLACI Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.
ARAFAT No! We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations.
I've shared this interview with my liberal "progressive" friends and their minds absolutely rebel, they cannot and will not accept the obvious implications here. They HAVE TO believe that the Palestinians want their own state like the rest of us, and all the other gifts and baubles bestowed by the market and by the modern creed of maximum personal autonomy. They cannot believe that their Noble Savage might just be...a savage.
The modern West has reached the point where if defending civilization and protecting an ally (not to mention an ally that's suffered so deeply in the Christian world) means hurting the feelings of a poor brown minority, they would prefer to submit and equivocate, or at least change the subject.
The poor Jews once again find themselves at the bottom of the West's moral hierarchy and left to fend for themselves. It'd be best for everyone if they'd just shut up and calmly submit to their own destruction, seems to be an idea that comes around at least once per century.
Brilliant analysis. Thanks for this
Thank you for reading :)
It’s always so refreshing to read your impartial and well-informed essays, I only wish they would reach a wider audience!
Thanks, I appreciate you reading. And feel free to share along :)
I agree. Alan puts all the thoughts battling my mind into clear and concise writing. I wish more people understood this war more, and that the media stopped their cruel cover of this war. Words matter.
These are not impartial essays.
I think if you take the time the time to read the body of essays on this topic, you may get a better sense. I linked to most in this essay, but I appreciate people don’t usually actual read those links for context.
https://3amthoughts.substack.com/p/israel-palestine
I’d read them before replying
My point was that you should do precisely that. I wrote them.
That was such a great piece! Thanks so much, there's so much to think about here. And apologies for the double comment.
It seems to me that the great tragedy of the Palestinians, and the root of their endless misery, is that they have become not a people but a Cause.
And terrible things happen to people when they become a Cause: ironically their needs and the needs of their children to have a healthy future become almost irrelevant, or at least always secondary to the needs of the Cause. The Cause must always be fed and kept alive, it becomes an imaginary totem that can never be allowed to fail or die, and that must be sustained even if by gallons of blood and hecatombs of bodies.
And what a cause! Created and upheld by some of the most dishonest and malevolent actors of the modern world: Arab tyrants and mullahs, who redirect all the hatred and rage their citizens rightly feel toward them toward the evil Jews, their eternal scapegoat; the Soviets and their campus grandchildren, whose Permanent Revolution has now devolved into a permanent tantrum, hoping to destroy the Jewish state in the name of Equality, with Equality meaning drowning the West in shame and guilt in the name of their twisted utopia where a brown boot stamps on a white face forever; and last but not least, the Parisian Nihilist-Maoists, whose ultimate goal was to burn down the West all so the philosophes could prove how anti-bourgeois they are (a Parisian intellectual would rather be tortured on the rack than be thought "bourgeois").
And thus we have the Palestinian "cause": millions of people condemned to misery for generations all so various outside actors could pursue their own agendas, mostly involving acting out various Western schemes of a utopian future that all seem to bare a striking resemblance to a cleansing Apocalpyse.
The Palestinian people will continue to die and suffer as long as they remain a Cause, and the Israelis will have to suffer along with them.
Thanks mate, no apologies for the double-comment at all, I always appreciate your inputs. With the Arafat quotes, it is interesting how even when one spells out in their own words the intent of the movement, Westerners will jump through contortions of mental gymnastics to deny or excuse. This is the foremost reason why I relied so heavily on direct quotes in this essay; I'll add the Arafat one to the collection, thanks!
The distinction between a people and a Cause very much encapsulates the Palestinian predicament. I've racked the books to think of another similar example and always come up short. Obviously, various groups and peoples have adopted causes, but it has rarely been the primary determinant of a national identity.
And so the Cause has been moulded and manipulated by almost all actors falling under the "anti-imperialist" agenda in the 20th/21st Centuries. In a sense, these various actors situate themselves as the lead role in a morality play, and the Palestinians - in all their suffering - serve as props on the stage, background images of dead kids and rubble while some academic in America pontificates about "martyrs" and "resistance".
I find it so bizarre that the Palestinian diaspora doesn't see this for exactly what it is, but I think you outlined the reason; when the Cause is the totem, it must be sustained at all costs.
The Fallaci quote comes from "Interviews with History and Conversations with Power"—now that was one smart brave lady!
My guess is that being a Cause not just a people provides different benefits to the ruled and to the rulers.
For the Palestinian rulers, a motley crew of fanatics and criminals: they've siphoned off billions of aid dollars to their own bank accounts, and being a Cause keeps them from dealing with the burdens of quotidian goverment, as tending to the needs of their population is now a job for the UN;
and for the people: being a Cause, with its aura of holiness, its sacred Nakba and "right of return" and its roster of martyrs etc lets them feel like History's special children, like noble sufferers and spotless victims, existing on a higher plane than the rest of us.
And this goes double now that the West has replaced Christianity w Historical Victim Worship and they've been added to the roster of sacred victims.
The Palestinian leaders and their people are the incarnation of the Arab world's refusal to accept the Jewish state, and no one really cares how many of them have to die as long as they take a lot of Jews w them and also keep the dream alive: the dream of eventually eradicating the Jewish state, no matter how much death and destruction it takes.
Cheers!
Such a fantastic read again, Alan, thanks a lot for giving your brilliant thoughts such a wonderful and intriguing voice! Highly appreciate it - and already shared it, as I agree with another comment on here that it should reach a wider audience!
I wrote these words for the Jerusalemn post 9 years ago
Daech, on one side,
Hamas on the other side;
The charta of Hamas, the belchings of Daech and of all the Hezbollahs and other gangs of murderers, base their action on a fake: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
charta of hamas:
'For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. Only when they have completed digesting the area on which they will have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion, etc. Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there.' (art 32)
If you have not read it, do it, the charta of Hamas is a monument raised by men to stupidity and hatred;
by the way, let's remind some features:
the active militants of Hamas are 25 000 (1% of the population)
in 1939 there were 100 000 SS (0,2% of the German population)
I, French, born a mono-polytheist (roman catholic), am asking us a question:
Must we be as blind as our ancestors in front of the murders of innocent Jews and in front of the threat of an extermination of the Jewish nation,
Must we be as ingenuous in front of the murders of innocent people in Europe and in front of the threat of the destruction of Europe?
The war and all its murders in Palestina - let's not forget it -are the consequences of a problem born in Europe, and solved (?) by the Europeans politicians after the war.
Let's not give help of any kind to the extremists who find in the tearful and pityful, here in Europe, a great support to their deeds, because Hamas (and Daech and all the others) is an excellent communicator and far better at this than the Israeli governement; Hamas shows this ability when using the population of Gaza both as a weapon and a victim, making of these people an arm of massive propaganda when, after carefully chosen attacks, they push the Israeli Governement to be the executioner of innocent victims, that they – the Hamas – delibaretely sacrifice to have the well-off europeans deplore and cry and as a consequence, support the Palestinian politics against Istael's.
Is it possible to lament over the murderers of innocent victims in Israel killed by Palestinians and hate the murderers killing innocent victims in France?
Is it possible to blame the response of the Police and army of Israel and ask for the same response in France?
What did our ancestors do when Jewish kids were thrown in fires? And what is our answer to these children dressed in agony, arriving from Auschwitz or Kielce in our days of sad splendor to witness the posthumous triumph of the adulterous children of Hitler?
Let's not cling on to our prejudices, let's not be the ingenuous pilgrims on the path of words, calling antisionism what is nothing else but the stinking antisemitism of Drumont or the highly refined antisemitism of Ms Virginia Woolf, which leads us to reject a country which is the last defense in front of the barbarism that threatens us.
But no confusion, the murderers have nothing in common with human beings – christian, jewish, muslim, atheist, buddhist…
I stop here, because I have known since the first time I read Qohelet that there is no end to write and say too many words.
Fantastic essay, Alan.
Arafat interviewed by Oriana Fallaci in the 1980s:
ARAFAT: We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation. The issues of this struggle, whether our friends like it or not, will always remain fixed by the principles that we enumerated in 1965 with the creation of Al Fatah. First: revolutionary violence is the only system for liberating the land of our fathers; second: the purpose of this violence is to liquidate Zionism in all its political, economic and military forms, and to drive it out of Palestine forever; third: our revolutionary action must be independent of any control by party or state; fourth: this action will be of long duration. We know the intentions of certain Arab leaders: to resolve the conflict with a peaceful agreement. When this happens, we will oppose it.
FALLACI Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.
ARAFAT No! We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations.
I've shared this interview with my liberal "progressive" friends and their minds absolutely rebel, they cannot and will not accept the obvious implications here. They HAVE TO believe that the Palestinians want their own state like the rest of us, and all the other gifts and baubles bestowed by the market and by the modern creed of maximum personal autonomy. They cannot believe that their Noble Savage might just be...a savage.
The modern West has reached the point where if defending civilization and protecting an ally (not to mention an ally that's suffered so deeply in the Christian world) means hurting the feelings of a poor brown minority, they would prefer to submit and equivocate, or at least change the subject.
The poor Jews once again find themselves at the bottom of the West's moral hierarchy and left to fend for themselves. It'd be best for everyone if they'd just shut up and calmly submit to their own destruction, seems to be an idea that comes around at least once per century.